Amazon SimpleDB – New Count Function, Long Running Queries, Etc.

We’ve introduced two improvements to SimpleDB‘s Select API. You can now count the number of items which match a condition, and you can handle queries which take more than 5 seconds to run.

The new count function is used like this:

select count(*) from MyFriends where EyeColor = ‘Blue’

Queries which take more than 5 seconds to execute used to time out and returned no useful data. Now, queries will return all of the results accumulated prior to the 5 second time limit, along with a NextToken which will allow a subsequent query to pick up where the first one left off.

By the way, the basic SimpleDB space allocation is 1 Terabyte (100 domains of 10 Gigabytes each). If you need more domains, fill in this form, send it our way, and and we’ll get you going within a day or two.